More Plants at the CNN Debate

Mary Katharine Ham | November 29, 2007 7:44 AM

This is utterly ridiculous. CNN should be incredibly ashamed and people should be fired over this. As it is, there's no mention of it on their front page despite the fact that they put out a statement about the gay general/Hillary supporter last night.

Michelle spots a John Edwards supporter, an Obama supporter, and a union activist among the questioners.

The signs for all are obvious and should have revealed themselves through a quick click-through to each YouTuber's bios and other videos. The girl who asked the abortion question is wearing a John Edwards t-shirt in one of her videos.

Flashback to my interview with Anderson Cooper:

Q: There’s been a bit of scandal about the screening that CNN did on its “undecided voters” for the last Democratic debate. The diamonds-and-pearls question was attacked by the questioner herself. There were some allegations that several of the voters were in fact liberal activists on quite a few issues (and one possible Democratic Party operative). What’s the process for checking these YouTube questioners and their affiliations?

AC: “Well, campaign operatives are people, too. We don’t investigate the background of people asking questions…that’s not our job. Last time around (in the Democrat CNN/YouTube debate), there were questions from Joe Biden’s campaign…and we had some fun with that (disclosing who they were posed by). Things like that are generally pretty obvious. In watching these videos after a while, you can kind of tell, who’s really serious about an issue and who’s just parroting a press release or a talking point.”